Ubergizmo’s Best of MWC 2013

Mobile World Congress is over and we have to say that it was our best MWC yet. The new venue is awesome and the level of organization is well above what we experienced in previous years. It’s not that last year’s Mobil World Congress was poor, but the space was really too tight, and the infrastructure was not able to sustain how big the show had become. Now, we worry less about Internet Connectivity (to a point…) and can pay more attention to the upcoming mobile technologies for 2013. Speaking of which, we have spotted a number of devices and technologies worthy of an Ubergizmo “Best of MWC” Award. Here is the list, in no particular order:

LG Optimus G Pro

With the LG Optimus G, LG had gone into “turbo” mode when it comes to smartphone design, but with the LG Optimus G Pro, we should be talking about “nitro mode”. At 5.5″, This smartphone features the largest 1080p display available on the market, a huge 3140mAh battery and a next-generation processor: put simply, this is the most powerful “phablet” in the world.

Nokia Lumia 720

At Mobile World Congress, Nokia’s mission has been to make high-end smartphone features available to the masses. The Nokia Lumia 720 pushes the design and functions of the Lumia line of products deep into “affordable” territory. Technology is great, but it’s even better when more people can actually access it: hats off to Nokia for that.

Qualcomm RF 360 LTE Front-End

Let’s face it: LTE bands worldwide is a mess. While phones up to 3.5G used a handful of identical radio frequencies around the world (or “bands” or “spectrum”), governments issued a cacophony of 40+ 4G LTE bands (worth billions of dollars), making it nearly impossible to build one phone design that works on every 4G LTE networks worldwide. Qualcomm’s RF 360 solves this by providing one radio front-end that works with most, if not all, LTE networks. This is one of the most complex problems associated with 4G LTE and Qualcomm cracked it.

Sony XPERIA Z Tablet

After launching the award-winning XPERIA Z smartphone, Sony has announced the matching XPERIA Z tablet, which is super-thin, packs impressive processing power and is waterproof. We have been very impressed by Sony’s design (read our hands-on), performance and overall execution on this project. This is something that you have to check out, and if we had to sum it up in one word, we would say: “wow”.

ASUS Padfone: a smartphone+tablet combo

MWC is the place where the Padfone concept was launched (it’s a smartphone that slides into a tablet body), so we expected ASUS to announce something like. What we did not expect was that ASUS blew our minds with this Padfone unibody design, fast hardware and quick phone/tablet transition. Never before the fusion of smartphone and tablet was so well done. What about doing laptop and desktop docks now?

ASUS FonePad: 7″ 3.5G smartphone for $249

It’s fair to say that those who doubted the success of 7″ tablets and large smartphones (aka Phablets) during the early days were completely wrong. Asus pushes the boundaries further with its 7″ Fonepad, a tablet with full voice functionality (if the carrier agrees) which is sold for an extremely affordable price of $249 (no contract). There’s no telling how many ASUS will sell, but we would definitely consider the option.

Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0

The Note 8.0 addresses a crowd that loves writing and taking digital notes. Samsung has led the development of electronic Pens on Android, and has introduced this 8″ Galaxy Note 8.0 which is the ideal balance between portability and pen writing comfort. At the same time, the Note 8.0 is also a real smartphone so that users don’t need to carry two devices.